It is known that the number and the volume of contents distributed in the telecommunications network is increasing very greatly and is even likely to double by 2012.
Furthermore, new terminals (mobile telephones, notebook computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), intelligent telephones, . . . ) now enable users to produce content in a manner that is much more flexible.
In particular, such pieces of equipment often include digital cameras incorporated therein.
Telecommunications networks of the Internet protocol (IP) type make it possible to store such digital data in different pieces of equipment and to manage the geographical zone over which the content is to be distributed.
Furthermore, some of the contents may be for a small audience, while other contents may be accessed by an audience that is much greater or even global. In order to satisfy this demand, the operators of telecommunications networks have deployed hierarchical architectures (of the content delivery network (CDN) type) in which content is initially stored at a central level in order to manage content distribution and in order to cope with the increase in traffic.
Unfortunately, that architecture requires major resources to be provided for storing data in network equipment.
Networks are also known that comply with the peer-to-peer architecture, in which digital content is stored and exchanged at the level of user terminals.
That solution is not satisfactory either, since it leads to an increase in traffic in order to access the data and to instability in the configuration as a result of connections and disconnections between users. Furthermore, any single terminal cannot serve a large number of requests to access content since the data rate of the terminal is small.
The invention relates to a mechanism of distributing content (initial storage, deployment, and delivery), which method does not suffer from the drawbacks of the prior art.